DIY Music Therapy

Diana always proclaimed, “I am my own best doctor!” On 24 October 2015 when cousin Anna phoned from Florida to wish Diana a happy birthday and asked what the secret was to living so long, Diana replied, only half in jest, “Stay away from doctors, nurses, hospitals, ambulances and all vestiges of the medical industrial complex.” She then added, “Look, let me simplify so even I can understand it: Keep breathing!”

Neither Diana, Anna nor i could ever have known that would be their last conversation. A little over one week later Diana was taken by ambulance to the nearby hospital following a minor thrombosis and, one week later, returned. She seemed to be fully recovered.

Often, after dinner those next few weeks, she requested that i put on a song she taped back in 2003 from an HBO show she discovered purely by accident. Over the next 12 years she had played it many times for friends saying it was still enjoyable because “the harmonies are far superior to those of Mozart or Haydn.”

She bookmarked the song on youtube and, for the next few weeks, requested that i play her “lullaby” as she found it relaxing. (Her wording was, “Please put on ‘Chuckie’?”)

While Diana maintained she was hardly a prude, she would no doubt caution the lyrics contain gratuitous scatological obscenities and vulgarities (i.e., F- and S-bombs). Still, her own “DIY Music Therapy” was far superior to anything touted in a textbook i reviewed in 2016.